Back in the good old days, the navigation lights on ship were small incandescent bulbs housed inside a small fixture in the company of coloured lenses. Simple and tiny as they were, in some way they always seemed to have a method of causing problems far out of ratio to their size. Most of the times it seemed as though the sheer act of putting a ship on the water in the dark will cause them to bluster out. A few night-time outings or a solitary season of use might lead to lifeless lights, oxidized sockets, and fogged up lenses. Worse, most of the old style NVG navigation lights were hardly what you might call user serviceable. Once a fixture tarnished, there was minute recourse besides changing the whole thing if you required getting more than a few weeks of usage out of it again.
These days, however, bright lights are becoming somewhat of an antique concept to be remembered with an eccentric mixture of trepidation and nostalgia. The days of trying to take away rusted fixtures from mounts, dirt-free corroded sockets and wiring, and then clear up smoggy coloured lenses are quickly receding into history as new-fangled navigation lighting technology comes to the forefront. Gone are the days of placing your boat in the hose down only to have your illuminations fail at the primary sign of an approaching yacht or cloudburst. Of course, we are talking about the beginning of the LED navigation lights into the marine navigation lights niche.
The light emitting diode, or "LED" for short, has chiefly obliterated the troubles usually associated with navigation lighting system. Powerful, well-organized, compact, highly tough and extremely long-lasting; luminescent navigation lights never stood a possibility once the LED was introduced. Where it was on one occasion pretty much benchmark practice to regularly inspect, clean and substitute your lights quite a few times during the boating time of year, LEDs have made it achievable to go a complete season with a bit more than an occasional examination to ensure all the marine parts supplies are still functioning as expected. In most of the cases, LED lighting wouldn't even require replacing for 5 years or more.